Let's be honest here…
… you stopped using those supercookies in 2015 because Verizon was forced to stop production then.
Had they still been available prior to you getting caught out, you'd still be using them.
Ad tech biz Turn Inc, which allegedly illegally tracked people online, has settled with US trade watchdog the FTC. The regulator said Redwood City-based ad-server Turn stalked Verizon mobile subscribers from website to website so it could build up profiles on each of them. That allowed the company to target people with ads …
Perhaps Turn have promised to be open and honest with ad purchasers. Turn can promise to lie to targets about the functionality of to 'do not track' button. They can promise that customers will only pay for adverts that appear on the browsers of targets who have expressed a relevant interest. Customers can be reassured that Turn will be honest with them and keep promises just like they do with everyone else.
Reading that the headers are injected into upstream traffic, so there seems to be little that can be done by the end user to protect their privacy. It would be nice if the FTC could level crippling fines on Turn and Verizon. Ideally, Turn should be fined out of business and Verizon should be fined to the point of being unable to turn a profit for several years.
They were caught and reprimanded, but I bet they still have all that data.
Why doesn't every legal jurisdiction have a "cannot profit from your crimes" law? Make Turn wipe their servers and backups to ensure all illegally retrieved data is gone.
Instead, they said "oops, sorry", and just get to carry on with 3-years of illegally gathered data on Verizon customers. Even today, a lot of that data is probably still viable, not everyone changes cell networks every year.
I am faintly (very very faintly) amused that the advertising wonks think that tracking anyone as they browse the web will reveal their "hobbies and interests". Let's face the truth: advertising wonks are professional liars. They lie to the target of their b.s., they lie to the people who hire them, and they lie to themselves about the efficacy of their filthy tactics.
Offhand, I can't think of a single thing I've bought as a result of online advertising. Amazon does make "recommendations" based on my browsing of Amazon, and those have sometimes led to a purchase of music I wasn't previously aware of, but that's about it. And even Amazon isn't right a lot of the time. My purchases of a couple of small, sensitive scales (one good down to 1 mg, more or less) are related to weighing the cat's medication and nothing else, and I have no interest in buying another scale of any type.
It will be noted that weighing the cat's medication is not an interest or a hobby.
Adblock-Plus makes browsing almost entirely ad-free and much more pleasant (and useful) than when your browser screen is cluttered with silly, pointless, ignorant ads.
PS: The medication I refer to is KCl; kitty has a slight K deficiency.